Our engineering handbook
Read the standards our teams work to before you hire us, and hold us to them afterwards.
Much of what we build moves money, health records or company data, and runs for a decade. Each team picks its own methods, and all of them must meet these standards.
How to read it
Several people wrote it, so the style changes between chapters. Some chapters are long. Monitoring is four lines.
It sets the minimum for environments, backups, alerting, the backlog and who owns what. Each team decides the rest.
- 01
Product Management
Every team needs a Product Owner, and four rules that make one effective: know the users, keep the backlog real, split stories small, and write acceptance criteria. Read - 02
Long-term Maintainability & Code Quality
Most of what we build has to run for 5 to 15 years. The five non-negotiables that follow from that: no dead code, no untested code, and refactoring always allowed. Read - 03
Starting a New Team
What a new team settles first: its own methodology, who owns adherence to it, real Product Ownership, and which technologies to reach for before building anything. Read - 04
Automation
Why we treat the build itself as an engineering product: install and upgrade in one or two commands, sane defaults, tooling that makes new people productive. Read - 05
Running Team Maturity Initiative
How team maturity gets implemented when every team owns its own methodology. Product Owners, training, and the environments a team needs to run it. Read - 06
Monitoring
Our production baseline: monitor every part of the ecosystem, alert on it, give the responsible people access, and be ready to fix problems around the clock. Read - 07
Developer Productivity
What we expect every developer to know and why one unproductive person changes a whole team — plus the two months we give anyone new to get there. Read - 08
ROI
Spending a client's money well is an engineering job: change a costly approach unprompted, prefer existing libraries, drop stories not worth building. Read - 09
Etiquette Guidelines
The small things clients notice: punctuality, being visibly present, cameras on, and what your background says before you speak. Read
More of how we work: How we work Engineering archive
Judge us against the handbook.
Bring us a problem, and measure what we give you against these standards.